Every once in a while, you run into pieces of gear that simply don't make any sense, and you ask yourself, "what the heck were they thinking!!!" Well, here's my theory as to what Yamaha was thinking when they made this sucker... There are 2 general agreements about the TX16W: it sounds great, and its impossible to use. Well, this is my explanation: Problem: blow away the professional market with a realistic-sounding synth. Solution: release a bad-ass sample module with a huge library of professionally-sampled instruments. This was not meant to be a sampler. It was meant to be a tone module. At the time it was made, a 12bit sampler with 1.5 meg multi-samples could sound 10 times more realistic than any synth (and if you DON'T want realism, then you should buy a DX7!). The fact that you could create your own samples was just a side-effect; you were meant to buy and play pre-sampled sounds. Thats why the sampling functions are so cryptic, with all the emplasis on multi-sampling, etc. Only die-hard users were supposed to actually try to sample. The rest were supposed to be content with all those stunningly realistic samples they gave you. Of course, that just my theory...